April, week one
Apr. 7th, 2018 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustApril came in like a lion, shaking its snowy mane. Forecasts of snow settling on the higher ground did not specify that this included Durham rooftops.
By Thursday it had gone, and we had a beautiful spring day. It was my father's birthday, and we would have taken the opportunity to go out to Finchale, as we have in past years, but an old friend was passing through, and we so rarely see him these days (he has moved to France and Germany - yes, both at once) so we invited him to lunch and had much conversation about family and friends and bicycles and places and work and play and holidays and suchlike. One thing he mentioned is that one of the villages neighbouring theirs in Provence is much favoured by the British, which I would normally not find inviting, but the name of the village is Cotignac, and there is indeed a quince connection, with a confrérie dedicated to promoting the fruit (scroll down to see the members in their green and yellow robes) and a quince festival in October...
Today we are back in the grey and rainy season. We paid our last visit to Marks & Spencer in Silver Street - in fact we were too late, because although they are theoretically open today, the shelves are bare and shuttered. If you wanted to buy anything other than half-price chocolate, you were out of luck. A sign announced that "It's not good-bye..." and I was so close to scrawling on it "Oh, yes it is!" Marks clearly hope that I will go to their out-of-town store at the Arnison Centre, and it's possible I might do that occasionally, just as I occasionally shop for clothes at their Newcastle branch. But I won't be popping in midweek for odds and ends, and the loss of the city centre branch makes it that much harder to do all of my weekly shop in the city centre.
So it goes.
By Thursday it had gone, and we had a beautiful spring day. It was my father's birthday, and we would have taken the opportunity to go out to Finchale, as we have in past years, but an old friend was passing through, and we so rarely see him these days (he has moved to France and Germany - yes, both at once) so we invited him to lunch and had much conversation about family and friends and bicycles and places and work and play and holidays and suchlike. One thing he mentioned is that one of the villages neighbouring theirs in Provence is much favoured by the British, which I would normally not find inviting, but the name of the village is Cotignac, and there is indeed a quince connection, with a confrérie dedicated to promoting the fruit (scroll down to see the members in their green and yellow robes) and a quince festival in October...
Today we are back in the grey and rainy season. We paid our last visit to Marks & Spencer in Silver Street - in fact we were too late, because although they are theoretically open today, the shelves are bare and shuttered. If you wanted to buy anything other than half-price chocolate, you were out of luck. A sign announced that "It's not good-bye..." and I was so close to scrawling on it "Oh, yes it is!" Marks clearly hope that I will go to their out-of-town store at the Arnison Centre, and it's possible I might do that occasionally, just as I occasionally shop for clothes at their Newcastle branch. But I won't be popping in midweek for odds and ends, and the loss of the city centre branch makes it that much harder to do all of my weekly shop in the city centre.
So it goes.
